just to be clear, I am not advocating for androids to hit people over the heads with wooden wile e coyote signs

one of the recurring complaints that I received about this was that the ridiculous things I made the character say were TOO ridiculous, since nobody actually said them and thus the argument is invalid. Consequently I produced an an alternate version.

Surprisingly this did not change anyone’s mind. I guarantee you any public figure consistently photographed wearing a cowboy hat believes one or all of these, and Trump himself either does also or doesn’t care if he enables and empowers someone who does.

the second could be better, but it was foremost a work of spite and that was supposed to be obvious from the low effort level, though still substantially more effort than the meme gifs with which people who had nothing to say tried to argue against it. The third frame refers to a number of killings that were justified after the fact by claiming that the people shot had mental illness, were on drugs or were criminals and thus are better off dead, the best known of which is the Kyle Rittenhouse matter. But I actually forgive him because he was 17 years old at the time and was plainly trusting in very bad people. He shot one person who attacked him BECAUSE HE HAD A GUN. After that occurred, two more attacked him, one with a skateboard, and they also got shot to death. The third had his own smaller gun, which also had no business being there. Was HE planning to shoot someone BEFORE he saw someone with a bigger gun? Impossible to know. So it is a complicated issue, but the PERCEPTION of this is that Kyle bravely fought for freedom and gunned down a mob of pedophiles, which isn’t what happened and isn’t what ever will happen outside of Deadpool 2 (which I didn’t particularly enjoy but that is unrelated), and they let their belief in this absurdity flavor their view of the world, which doesn’t help ANYONE. Leftists (as I have been called for posting comic strips like this) don’t help by presenting the House of the Ritten as a deliberately acting white supremacist T800 either, but as unfortunate as that is it stops short of endorsing more gun violence.

stupid arguments led to the creation of a THIRD strip but since it actually has new drawings I should probably try and pass that off as next week’s update instead of forcing it into this one. I am also tired after foolishly responding to no less than thirteen comments from the same guy who seems to have only seen that troublesome third frame, even after I discovered that he spent several WEEKS, maybe years, arguing that She-Ra looked too much like a man in some dumb cartoon.

The people who want to argue with me about this literally having nothing better to do or aspire to do. I ought to at least act like I do.

that I can be systematically unable to update the website for this long and not be stressed out of my mind about it is surely a positive indication. I have been spoiled by all the automated websites where I can just select a picture and it shows up. For this I have to manually upload it and put in the code for it and somehow or another I cannot spare the mental change to go through with that at the moment. After sorting out some prolonged nonsense with the comic book printing website I assure you I will get to posting filler trash that I already put on twitter a week ago.

I have been relettering what turned into pretty much the whole first comic book based on the same offhand remark that had me meticulously relettering book two in 2018, amidst also relettering book 3. It is a somewhat automatic mode, just very time consuming. I am not even necessarily checking for unintelligibility; if one bauble from before is readable but blatantly does not match another on the same page that I just did, I have to change that one also. If it looks too much like I was trying to imitate a font in the version that was printed in 2015, I have to redo it. If a word is HYPHENATED and on two lines, I started making myself redo all of that, which often requires restructuring the area around that. If the bauble’s shape is wrong, because I only decided lope’s should always be circular midway through preparing book 1 the first time and didn’t care that some didn’t match until THIS time, obviously I must redo that. I also decided kumquat’s shouldn’t be in that bad tintin pastiche shape midway through relettering book 2, and again let it slide if it was on a page I had already redone, but since I am re-checking every page, that means everything is up for
look see I am a sick sick person. I can’t draw well enough to be a good artist, but I can make the text readable, of nearly uniform thickness, I can make the containers balanced, consistent shapes.
Apparently I believe that so it is going to eat two weeks of my time every time there is one thing in a book that I want to change which leaves me vulnerable to witnessing other things that are no longer acceptable. I am glad I don’t have the energy to no look I’ll show you whatever beets I am here anyway.

Can you see what is wrong with this little section here? Probably not. At much smaller size on the page you definitely couldn’t. That is even worse! I hate knowing a small problem is there and nobody else seeing it, and just pretending isn’t there. Tiny little pieces of paper stuck to the carpet, I can’t live with that. The little stickers with a number on them stuck to new clothing. When somebody “cuts” off a tag on a piece of clothing, leaving tag residue which is not only worse than a full tag, but much harder to remove since you can’t (and I won’t) grab tag residue to pull the strings out so they can be cut. It has to go. Only I can destroy it.
Part of being able to make the fixes I “need” to make requires separating formerly flat pages, that I had been PROUD to be able to do flat, into multi-layered setups. I would select the color of the text containers, move those up, then expand the selection and fill that in with black. Which works theoretically but since in actuality I was not sick enough to need things to be totally smooth then, expanding the selection makes tiny little one pixel blemishes into these horrible skin diseases that I have to scratch out of existence, then I need to fill in the space on the base layer that I moved this stuff off of because it still has the old outlines which will show through if I move or change the shape of anything. I should be in a hospital. My brain should be connected to a computer as part of a circus sideshow because they can’t elephants anymore and it is not proper to call people with physical deformities “freaks” anymore, but I admit I am a freak and if somebody wants to pay to see a brain melt into porridge amidst the most tedious and pointless fever dream tasks ever taken on voluntarily by somebody whose life has no meaning, they don’t even have to pay since plainly I will do stuff for free just to feel like I matter to an ever less reputable class of people since nobody doing anything with their own life would stick around this one. And sometimes not even then; I could probably name 50 people with no skill or inspiration who watched my pages, acted like they cared, then abruptly didn’t despite still caring about the same brain dead hacks they cared about before and after me but you would not have heard of them and deservedly so. Including the one whose ultimate life advice was ‘let it go.gif’ if I have one undeniable attribute it is my fragrant inability to let any it go. If it will be my death, it was a life I could not have lived while attempting to let its go on the counsel of people who have less value than monopoly money which is at least pretty and distinguishable from other sorts of money.
I actually made a SECOND picture for somebody since I worked so hard on the first one that it was terrible even though that person has no bearing on my existence and probably already forgot about it. There are people who come to me every time I offer to do stuff for money and ask for something even though I know they have no money so I would have to do it for free if I did and sometimes I do. I am already buried in projects I will never finish that will haunt me until my death. Me offering to do work for money guarantees in the near future I’m going to be doing extra work that neither further my goals or gets me even the most pitiful organ grinder monkey money.

And apostrophes! I drew them vertically mirrored for years! I was so proud of myself to be drawing real typewriter apostrophers instead of ‘ those stupid things, even though I wasn’t drawing them properly and nobody cared except for me, later, when I realized they were wrong. It shouldn’t really matter since I have to rewrite all the text, apostrophes included, but a month ago I thought I wouldn’t and could get away with just changing the apostrophites.

But I feel a little better now.

Did I have a broken video here for the past 5 days? I thought I switched it to one hosted on my own space but I must not have saved that. Whoooooopth.
////////////////////////

the best of hercules

A person identified as pinderhooks recently alerted me to this. Somebody uploaded the full film without permission from the copyright holder Pulse Distribution and I then likewise edited it without permission from that person.

“Hercules” is a low budget cartoon from 1997,that probably has only about a standard tv time slot’s worth of animation which is stretched, sometimes painfully so, out to 48 minutes so it can occupy an hour block and present itself as a feature film instead. I assure you, the cutting room floor was EMPTY. Everything they had went in here and it still wasn’t enough. Consequently its most striking feature is the profoundly horrid editing; at points there is up to 12 seconds of no/barely any motion before something happens. It has a look like it is animated by the company which did robert smigel’s “saturday tv funhouse” cartoons with assistance from the cdi-Zelda gang for closeups. The only indication that you are seeing the film as intended and not an insulting edit like this one is that the music keeps playing and playing and playing unbroken. I really should have had the sound muted while making this since that dorky trumpet fanfare is haunting me now

I watched it once and had the terrible idea to cut out and assemble all the stupidest parts. Completely on a whim when I have obligations stacked higher than the person who storyboarded this I decided to spend several days making a cheap movie that nobody cares about look even cheaper and less worthy of interest. I initially endeavored to maintain the spirit of the original cut when altering the film but when it came out to over ten minutes, nearly a quarter of the full film’s running time, I wondered if it would even come across that I didn’t extend the length of those scenes myself, and in the event of such a perception, why had i chosen the most boring parts to do that in? Somebody thinking sensibly could probably get this under nine minutes but every time i go looking for stuff to cut out i remember another thing from my initial viewing that might be worth squeezing in there. Somebody wishing to only show everything important and not waste time could probably get it to five minutes.
At times the film resembles a bad stage play, in which actors struggle to remember their lines or read off of cue cards. I wonder if the dialog was recorded live, like an old popeye cartoon, with the actors watching the cartoon and waiting for the right time to say lines, but with a considerably lower production budget and no ad-libbing. At one point you can even hear a character, the boss hydra head, start to say “oh shut up” while the character is off-screen, then seemingly realize it, and wait for the scene to change to complete the line. It is not in this edit; eventually I considered that the significance of that would not come across due to all of my deliberately bad editing.
There are a few moments which could be seen as vulgar and uncharacteristic of what I usually produce but once they suggested themselves to it seemed pointless to not use them. They are vague and might not be apparent anyhow.
I do not actually hate the film, even if Hercules himself is dull and conspicuously beardless, since the primary marketing strategy for this sort of product was to get their product mistaken for the disney version, even if the actual content is quite different, and that second fact works in its favor, I think. Apart from calling every character by their Greek names except for Hercules, but that convention predated Disney’s version. Eurystheus’ voice amuses me. There are numerous bits of weird animation and dialog that I like just as they Are. The film is broken and confused, and I relate to that. It screws up and skews the myths but not to the banal extent that disney did. Hercules, as a “hero” who murdered hundreds of people, including his first wife Megara and their children, and had considerably more male lovers than female, chief among them Iolaus, his companion in this film and nephew (and also recipient of Megara as a re-gift-wife in versions of the story in which Hercules only kills their children and not her), is never going to be a g-rated 1990s role model for children. Hercules’ murderous fit of madness is actually alluded to in this film but you only see a ruined city and it is said that only one person was killed, and that person is not even really dead.
Everything i know about the disney version is from contemporary advertisements for it and a description of Danny Devito’s character that I read on a burger king cup around that time (as with the nuggets, Burger King didn’t bother to not give the cartoon-branded products to regular customers) and what I read on wikipedia just now, but I know it depicts Zeus as monogamous and Hera as Hercules’ biological, non-hating mother. Zeus’ infidelity to Hera and Hera’s utter hatred for Hercules is at the very core of the Hercules story. And making Hades the easy bad guy dumps all nuance of just what the god of the underworld is. He isn’t Satan: he does not buy souls, he doesn’t trick people, He isn’t evil, he just happens to preside over the dead. The Greeks had this idea millenia before mopey nerds started obsessing over the idea of misunderstood sad monsters. Mopey nerds who of course only consider the disney versions of anything so they think this concept is new. Hades does covet the souls he has and takes revenge when people try to cheat death but all the gods are covetous and vengeful. Anyway Hades does not appear in this Hercules film so that is unimportant.

Another loser on the internet fancies itself a great musician? It would be me! Except this isn’t new, I was just totally terrified and un-encouraged for years, certain of humiliation if my compositions were ever heard, even though mopey low effort “chiptunes” have been getting great traction for years. Yes, imagine me overthinking something! And then trashing the effort of somebody else who didn’t!

You might be aware that I attached this drawing to a previous, completely unrelated website post, potentially because I just told you.

I reused it here because the composition relies heavily on what I call midi stairs. This seems to me like a lazy technique and proof of my amateurish music skills and I am self-conscious about it, even though I made that part in 2005 and still think it sounds good. Visually, the stairs are incomplete, uneven, and rather unsafe-looking; the sort good for falling down. Apart from that, I had not uploaded the drawing to any website other than this one, so it would look like I drew it just to attach to the music. Right, the website I put the most effort into, I give the least consideration to. We hurt the ones we love because they are dumb enough to forgive us.

I have so far received four comments on this composition, and all four referred to the creature having fallen down the stairs. When I linked to it on twitor, the drawing was not visible, and there was no verbal acknowledgment, which likely indicates the visual component is crucial, if not the only component people are aware of. Twitter of course is the best place for complex, implication-free typed discourse, and it didn’t just introduce a facebook-like automatic obscure-person-marginalizer a few weeks ago.

This is off by default, at least on accounts that predate its implementation, but isn’t it fun to have this whole new category of anxiety to contend with on a website where I am already afraid to talk?

And obviously it is a very SCRAPPY drawing. Perhaps I would do better to attach less scrappy drawings. But I do not have time to draw non-scrappy things that are only going to be seen compressed into blurry video boxes. I may have to take the risk that not everybody in the world has seen and remembers every old drawing I have ever made, in such a way that to see the drawing again would be offensive and grounds for retaliatory perma-shunning.

I did have one previous recent visible music upload, but one of the [totally inconsequential, late-added] audio samples sounded really bad, and I have corrected and wish to re-upload it. But I don’t want to reupload it because my you-tube “subscribers” will get notices. And I am sure they will disapprove because I had 16 before the first upload and 15 afterward. I know this music is better because the number stayed the same! (although the twitter number went down but I just saw that NOW after I checked my own link so I am not getting into it)

But that is a video site anyhow! I could just upload the music here! Or anywhere! But for that music, I actually drew the picture specifically FOR it and feel that it must be seen. And so I must find an opportunity to reupload it so that nobody will see it, so that I can finally show it to them.

This began as an attempt to recreate what I saw when I visited the Loovruh museum in Paris, which was a very odd sight: dorks and morons alike crowding into a huge room full of huge paintings to fixate on one that is very tiny, and make terrible blurry reproductions of the most reproduced and easy-to-acquire-perfect-reproductions-of art works perhaps in history. Somehow it was not odd enough, and things went strange as I was adding details.

So I have fixated on irrelevance to such a degree that it subdues and consumes the original point of what I was doing through overthinking and overworking. It took three times as long as it should have and means nothing, and still looks incomplete enough that I might dump a few more hours into it. Good to know I still got it!

I mean to say that I still have it.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ (it is an expensive painting)

An updehhh from July 4:

In the event you were curious how a decent idea becomes clownish rubbish, look there to see the odd path this took to be “finished!”

One of the figures in the sketch I drew inadvertently kind of looked like Tintin and that was somehow enough to ruin it all. What surprises me now is that I reversed the direction of the battleaxe on the inadvertent tintin figure prior to removing the axe entirely, and that removing it was one of the last things I did.

Also, if you can identity the characters I started to draw in the seventh and eighth slides then you win a schnibble because after momentary reflection I thought no one would be able to.

On April 3 I was waiting for a bus, with a plastic bag containing three boxes of cookies. This was one of the boxes. It is the subject of the following sentences and perhaps that is why I have no picture of the other two boxes, which came from different manufacturers. The cookies were to be eaten during an art show reception I was participating in that I suspect I will never get around to writing about. Certainly I would want people to show up to look at the artwork rather than to eat the cookies, but I had already seen the art and needed something else to occupy myself with.

A woman and man were also waiting for the same bus I was. They were beside a tree so I stood on the other side of the tree. It was unusual for anyone else to be waiting in this place, and it was also unusual for me to travel with such a large quantity of cookies. These two factors would combine in a most tragic circumstance.
The woman walked in front of the tree, so that she was almost in the street, looked over my bag and spoke. This was immediately bad news. Ordinarily nobody speaks to me in public except to ask me for money. This time it was worse.

“You like to eat organic stuff, huh?”

I responded to the effect of “I try.” I eat a lot of garbage. Not as much as I once did.

“Kashi contains GMOs, those cause cancer.”

The person pronounced “GMOs” like “jeeyemoze.” If I didn’t know what GMOs were genetically modified organisms already and that this person was pronouncing the letters in an abbreviation, the statement ought to have confounded me, so clearly I had to already know what GMOs were and did, and yet the person spoke as if she an adolescent telling a younger sibling that Santa Claus didn’t exist as petty revenge.
I believe, but cannot confirm, that I responded “anything you buy at a supermarket is going to kill you.” Perhaps I should have said “get away from me, you presumptuous tub” but I am never at my best while waiting for a bus.
The person replied, still looking at my bag, undeterred by my lack of mindblow, “Yeah… you should grow your own food.”

She waited a moment, and before I could ask “do you grow your own food?”, and perhaps I wouldn’t have, because my immediate goal was to make her voice stop, she curtly remarked “gmoze are really bad for you. you should google it” and returned to her side of the tree, CASE CLOSED, without considering that I might have anything to say to it, like she was a living Hi and Lois cartoon.

I was too filled with hate to respond.
By the time it was a feasible option we were on the bus and I preferred, for the moment, unfulfilled resentment to attempting to speak to someone like that. It was far safer for me to silently hate her and myself than to risk the hate being focused on her exclusively, who had not had thirty years to develop antibodies for it. The fact that I hated myself for not focusing my hate on the woman is a marvel of evolution.

I object to a stranger telling me that I “should” do something, and I object to a stranger assuming I lack knowledge, and I object to Hi and Lois.

I was immediately reminded that four days earlier one of my more virally-minded face-book relations reposted this image, which mixes specific brands with general company names and seems to think Nestlé, one of the largest food companies in the world is a product of its considerably smaller and exclusively confection-focused competitor The Hershey Company. Both have been known to profit from exploitative labor used to obtain their chocolate, though Hershey has at least expressed a willingness to change that. In 2012. There is no wrong reason to boycott Nestlé.

Indeed most of these companies have been selling massively processed, sugar-soaked, salt-smothered de facto poison for more than half a century, for much of that with full knowledge of the long-term health effects of consuming such things. Why have I never been pestered about for drinking Coca Cola in public, but this harmless closed box is a problem? Because there was no mass-repostable graphic that said to harass Coke-swallowers recently. You would have had to actually read paragraphs about it and reach a conclusion on your own to realize it was garbage. Or look at the back of the packaging.

Go forth and boycott Monsanto products! I made a poster!

Okay!

Eh do you care why? There’s a URL on my poster…

Nope! It was in stylishly arranged photoshop text! That’s good enough for me! I’m going to find somebody who’s already bought one of these and try to make them feel bad about it! Maybe I’ll even get an opportunity to use “google” as a verb!

The boycott picture doesn’t say “GMO” on it anywhere, so it is likely that my informant also found a smirky, kony-esque video to go into scantily more detail.

Or perhaps she saw this graphic and realized oh no, three letters! That’s at least two thirds as bad as MSG!

I actually DID “google” it and the very first image was one which gave no information at all beyond ooh dass bad! In fact I was so sure it would that I wrote the part referring to “this graphic” prior to my finding and placing it here. Perhaps I should have used the text search, but I was only instructed to employ google and not any specific google function.

I am concerned that gmo is approaching southern connecticut from two different directions but for the moment I am safe.

Fortunately, no GMO comes in all these stylish and delicious flavors, which can never be used to misdirect public opinion. I just hope none of these graphics contain JPG.

I am fortunate that I correctly assumed she meant google and not googol, a number which is 1 followed by one hundred zeroes, because I probably would have run out of money buying that many gmos.

So bus stop lady now has terminator lock-on vision that can seek out a kashi logo at 30 feet behind any non-lead obstruction. It’s like smoking a cigarette in the 1990s, this week, except we got off the bus at the smokiest bus stop in town, where every third person is smoking a cigarette, spitting after smoking one or selling cigarettes to somebody else, and she didn’t accost anybody. It is no longer trendy to pester cigarette smokers because the government does it already by putting six dollars worth of federal, state and local taxes on a single little box of them. Mission accomplished. The woman also managed to get past the Duncan Donuts and Subway stores across the street (and presumably every other street in New Haven) without procuring a megaphone and yelling JEEYEMMOHZ at exiting customers.

it is possible that as a buyer of “organic” goods I seemed like somebody with an inflated sense of superiority that needed to be ruptured. In fact, any remotely edible thing I had that was in a box would have jammyohs in it. “organic” is the enemy specifically because it thinks it’s better but perhaps is not, in all cases. I can understand resenting that. The goal was not to enrich my life with health advice –not she nor the poster suggested any alternative, GMO-free products– just to get me off my high horse. However, I have also been avoiding high horses ever since I found out they were enriched with MLP.

Perhaps it is unrealistic to expect somebody to say: “were you aware that Kashi is known to use, in its products, genetically modified crops such as corn and soybeans and furthermore has done so without denoting this anywhere on the packaging? Though the Séralini study which linked these crops to cancer has been divisive in the scientific community there is nonetheless a need for regulation and public awareness of what goes into food. Consider that these crops are resistant to pesticides, which therefore encourages use of the pesticides, which may be harmful to things other than the crop and the ‘pests.'”
However, this would have exhibited knowledge and good intentions, rather than grasping at an opportunity to inflict inferiority on somebody you know nothing about, with no provocation. It might also have encouraged conversation (provided there was a pause after the initial question), rather than scorn. Fortunately my scorn is all natural.

I like the idea of viral hypey thoughtlessness actually being put toward a useful cause, but it probably isn’t going to change anything, because it is still thoughtless, and when it’s one of my own causes I become inclined to dislike it out of spite. Nobody involved is going to learn anything. If GMO is defeated and removed from food but replaced by DDT or BVD or MXY or POG then these people won’t take it on themselves to find out, and won’t believe a suggestion from somebody else unless it is communicated on the same terms used by people selling it to them.

The woman didn’t say anything about me having three boxes of cookies, either, which are inherently lethal. “you like to eat a lot of cookies, huh? Cookies have fat and sugar in them, you should hotbot it.”

She was right that the single Kashi allotment were the worst of the bunch. I didn’t get to eat one but they felt weird. I would have known not to buy them in the future without any outside influence decreeing it.

Well that was quite a week, wasn’t it!

===================================

No this is about something else!

I had a half-hearted complaint about fox television [back in September] and realized I hadn’t posted this where I said the same stuff better. It’s old but time increasingly has no meaning to me.

from the creators of arrested development comes another ugly, ugly, vulgar lecherous cartoon. Usually they can say from Mike Judge or Seth McFarlane or Matt Groening, established ugly cartoonists who just happen to have had success in the field. Arrested Development was not an ugly cartoon. Why, if they were to transition into animation, would they choose to have their product be ugly if the possibility existed that it did not have to be? Footooraba at least has some competent background design work, even if it’s no less derivative of 1950s science comics than any live action shows of the 1980s. THIS, if I am accurately informed uses no background design at all and just swaps in photographs. It appears to take place at an academic institution of some sort, if I had to guess, and I do because I’ll never watch this advertisement with the sound on or again, I’d say it’s a High School, because America[‘s broadcast masters] can’t get enough high school. I’ve been avoiding tv shows and movies set at high schools my whole life. There have been so many, that I could watch a few regularly and still miss enough to claim to have avoided them.
After a bit of reading I probably definitely shouldn’t have bothered with, I discovered that far from creating this, Mitchell Hurwitz merely copied the idea from ANOTHER show from Australia and then pitched it to networks after the American The Office got popular, and it was only the Fox channel in the end who demanded it be a terribly drawn cartoon. The character designs, incididdly, are by Mo Willems, of whom this page claims “His illustrations, wire sculpture, and carved ceramics have been exhibited in galleries and museums across the nation” Of COURSE they have.

Somewhere there’s an exclusive club made up entirely of multi millionaires who had absolutely terrific times in high school and want everyone to know it.
Glee, I saw the first episode, and no more. Maybe that’s not long enough to form a proper judgment but it should be long enough to make me want to watch again and I didn’t even want to finish. It was a mildly entertaining rehash of the same old high school-themed junk I’ve been sick of/utterly unable to relate to for most of my life. It didn’t do nearly enough to bring me back for a second show, but the dorkwash of praise around it was plenty adequate to keep me away. That stuff is 100% market research. People will watch anything if it has high school or kids singing at the screen in it.

I simply have no interest in people playing sports and falling in love and losing sports but then winning sports and going to classes sometimes in highschool, regardless of whether they’re the first black anything. No part of high school for me was easy and definite enough that I would let it pass in a montage. This was related to some movie that came out a few years ago that I almost wrote about but I can’t remember what it was, but it’s worth saying, because they make that one a lot. I don’t suppose anybody wants to watch a television program about filling in worksheets, twice daily hour+ long busrides, or a year long speech strike resulting in expulsion, including me, and my situation(s) are so unusual that I shouldn’t expect anybody with money to know, much less care, much less gamble a pilot on it. But what they show instead is such a fallacious fantasy that after a few tries loses its novelty value and we realize it’s not meant to be novelty value but they think that’s reality.
I’m sick of “anti-hero” nerds. I’m at the point where The Most Unlikely is always exactly who I expect it’s going to be. Being a nerd must rule. You actually understand course material and there’s an established clique of like-minded gorkachus who share your interests. To date the only depiction of high school I’ve seen that I relate to that I recall occurs in Billy Madison, one of the least realistic movies ever made, even by Adam Sandler stadards, assuming he has any, in which at one point Billy starts yelling out the corny lines (Chlorophyll? More like bore-o-phyll!) that made him popular in grade school the week before and suddenly nobody thinks he’s funny anymore. Thankfully he only had to be in high school for a month. Forrest gumping Gump got through high school and college in about three minutes evidently without any stress or emotional crises, dropping only some narration of the length it time it took in non-montage time, five years, that’s supposed to make him seem like a twit for not realizing that’s longer than it’s supposed to take… I’ll be lucky to do it in six, not including the four year break in the middle! Clearly I’m not going to find fictional underachievers more pathetic than myself unless I invent them.

How is this at all fair? Even they get to have a dumb club.

Golly goopity I typed “gleek” into google to get a picture of that dopey blue monkey so I could post it here and pretend I was confused, not expecting gleekitude was an actual THING that people have taken upon themselves. I can’t tell if the television marketing ad executives invented it or if the viral marketing ad executives invented it, but it’s awful enough for either. Ha ha look we are proud to call ourselves an insulting name! We are very fond of labels! Please sell us official authorized merchandise with this word on it!

Alfight so I wrote most of that last year… by now this trope processing plant’s been on television for about a year and a half and it already has [at least] seven albums –depending on whether the two christmas albums are included in that total– presumably all covers, performed by the exact same people. I don’t even think Now that’s what I call an album title that’s annoying to use in a sentence was chudding them out that fast, and they weren’t presumably also producing a quasi-weekly and one imagines scripted national broadcast at the same time. Why indeed even make the television show? Glee Christmas II: Return of Durant has twelve songs on it. Unless the program has already degenerated to the point where every week is a christmas episode, it seems most likely a majority of the recordings were produced exclusively for the album, which unlike the TV show people have to pay for in currency apart from their souls and I am meant to think they do. Maybe the price is worth it to be able to imagine the singers aren’t in tv high school.

My theatre class ah teacher let’s say pronounced me a “gleek” when I stated that Michael Crawford from the film edition of A funny thing happened on the way to the Forum went on to play the Phantom of the Opera, after she posed the question of what Crawford was best known for. First of all, if I’m anything, it’s because I know Michael Crawford starred as Phineas in the London West End production of Barnum in 1981 and while I admire his linguistic speed and ability to walk across a fleeping tightrope while singing I still prefer Jim Dale’s official Broadway cast album version of the same songs because his put-on American accent sounds less like Regis Philbin.
But second, I object to having my awareness of things that predated my existence summed up in terms of a tacky sponsor expo that’s younger than my external hard drive. If I’m older than Glee but share some of its passions then perhaps glee is a meek. Ha uh oh no.

If this smarm mill is for establishment nerds who aren’t cool enough to like Kidz Bop, the muhponies of a few weeks ago may be for those not cool enough to like Glee. Whether or not that is true it lets me transition into the next bit which isn’t looking to be relevant again soon.

I can’t tell if this is a gag or not. I no longer have any concept of what’s funny and what’s serious to these people (“these people” being the users of the website with that or similar layouts or other websites used by them dissimilar in appearance). If you’re unacquainted with the orange-horned albinos that’s well enough but they tend to manifest their presences in the exact same way as the diminutive equines. This person isn’t against obsessive fans; just obsessive fans for other properties. Although I suppose merely having a ripoff character that you represent yourself with is a long way from the extreme of obsession, and this person has a considerable list of obsessive traits that he does not possess. So I am instead concerned that he possesses an obsession obsession. I am concerned because I saw what that affliction did to me.

However, is there a club for me if I’m also anti-random tough guys with mustaches? Must I align myself with the Ice Road Truckers to express frustration with something? Must I stand behind Animal from the Legion of Doom to have a say in this?

By Skipper I don’t feel safe in this company. Gleek’s not going to be any help against the Legion of Doom; the Wonder Twins were cut from that series!

Whatever am I going to do about pink-shirted, booted men in gargoyle poses flying through space by their own power?

No, not compose an ode of praise!

A more important question, perhaps: does this make me an obsessive Superfriends fan? If it’s possible to ask the question, to be in my presence without this becoming immediately apparent then we probably don’t have to argue about it.

Furries, glecowafers and their ilks are very much like the people in Flatland, a book about a world that exists entirely in two dimensions (there’s an inaccessible bit for my math class), in that they are incapable of looking at matters as a non-furry would. They can’t be “against” any overpromoted entity for breeding monotony because they’ve never been “for” anything that didn’t.
But I was here to talk about Glee and the gleek army specifically, right? (sort of) Well good news I’m done. They may live and do as they please.

But good news for whom?? Oh deef. Well I hope somebody managed to learn something from all this.

I also look forward to next year’s means of being dumber than this one.

A few intervals ago I mentioned Al Terzi, and how I had no real memory of him post-1989. After typing his name into the Internet, I discovered that he scares me now.
in part, no doubt due to resembling the ghastly photograph-print on the old Lipton tea box, which scared me then. That scared me partially because of the dual tone, high contrast yet faded greys used, Terzi does not look like this, but he reminds me of other aspects of the lipton picture that didn’t necessarily scare me, so he is scary by association.

Though I implicated the colors, the angle, facial expression and hat are nonetheless alarming.
Once I found out where these were in a store, I couldn’t go near them. i would see the red and yellow from a distance and not go down the aisle. (this was at the time also a good way of avoiding a match with Hulk Hogan)

Well gee it’s trimmed down quite a bit since I knew it.
I used to love the lipton iced tea, but when I learned to identify logos and discovered this was the same as the scary guy company, I stopped drinking it immediately, and continued not drinking it long after Lipton had ceased to appear on his own packaging.
By now they’ve replaced the delightful plain white cans with some less forgivably gaudy rubbish (but at no point Lipton himself, mercifully), and I can’t find it in cans anymore anyhow, so I can never return to it and express my true feelings. Tragic.
And I distinctly recall some advertisement about the late 1980s in which a chorus gleefully sang the word “decaffienated!” while a camera momentarily fixated on a closeup of the troublesome box. I didn’t know what decaffeinated meant but I assumed it had something to do with my downfall. Thankfully “The Lipton Tea Man,” as one website I could find evidence of this labeling on refers to him (for he is fond of drinking the lipton tea tea), is based on a real person, of whom other photographs can be found which render him less inflexible, 2-dimensional and inhuman, and thus the one scary version of less permanent and menacing.

He is no less dangerous, but now lacks the psychological advantage.



Which is more than I can say for the yet unidentified, disembodied, disemHEADed phantom of the opera face fragment on the Taster’s Choice label from the same period. This was replaced by a full head at some point, and the model himself posed near to it after he successfully sued Nestle for using it (and before Nestle successfully appealed the verdict) without telling him or paying him, but I can’t find any conclusive proof that these were the same person.

We know he is the fellow on the left container, there identified as The Taster, (Nestle’s counter-argument claimed that he chose to not be paid) which shows a full head. However, the photographs were taken in 1986; the partial head was in use before then! I expect Nestle used this new guy because it was no longer on speaking terms with the fragment, which was upset more than likely over breach of anatomical context. Worse, behind the packages on the left we have introduced a NEW head fragment; attorney Eric Stokel doesn’t even have a mouth. Might I ever find peace through full accumulation of pieces?

But anway, back to my point: looking like Lipton is bad news.

I don’t even remember what this guy did (though Wikipedia informs me he used state helicopters to get to church) but he really doesn’t have to do anything.

The virility of this family is worrisome. Rather an elaborate scheme to keep us from realizing that they lost the secret ancestral recipe for spelling wharf properly.

It is far more than a mere arbitrary childhud fixation of mine. Somebody meant for me to be afraid…

See here: I have now evidence that Lipton is secretly a robot. And what are robots’ natural foes in the wild? Correct. Skeletons.

And so it is portentous that they have teamed on this occasion. But what’s so scary about this skeleton? Nothing, really; this one has been injured and its Lipton cloaking drive damaged.

But when first it met Kuros, folklore’s bravest destitute vagrant, the skeleton was very tiny indeed. The smallest form is most alarming, because it looks like it is wearing a Lipton hat. Luckily pausing covers up the sprites so I never, as a child, until now noticed that the bones which are being thrown (naturally) resemble elongated backward ‘S’es. I wouldn’t have gone into stores at all if I knew there were little Liptons hopping all over the place tossing pieces of the alphabet at their detractors.

As the skeleton eats more of Kuros’ magical meatballs, the valuable protein causes it to grow and be less frightening. For with maturity (observe that the skeleton has acquired the wisdom to use an axe to cut the meatballs into reasonable bite-sized portions), the skeleton realizes it doesn’t have to look like Sir Thomas Lipton and scare people to get attention, but like most profound revelations it came too late and Kuros murdered the poor undead mariner anyway so that he could

steal the treasure and finally reassemble the fearsome Energy Zone robot,

who promptly resumed terrorizing the good shirtless citizens with its insistence on jumping for no reason. I told you Kuros was a bum.

For the purpose of disclosure I should admit that of course the magic wand meatball picture was a fabrication; real warriors always bring the boots to this level.

I’m surprised the senate doesn’t get more done when both parties are led by the same person. As I get all my news from The Daily Show (whose stories are a day late which I witness a week late), liberal-leaning online acquaintances being outraged at stuff and whatever is on Google News Canada’s front page when I search for art titles, I confess I’m a tad behind on my government. At this time I was trying to find out who the Republican guy is that looks like Sir Thomas Lipton, and I came to the wikehhhpedia page about senate leaders. At the top of the page is the majority leader. First I thought “what, that guy’s a democrat? I see him on internet television and always think he seems like…” and then scrolled down to see “oh THAT guy” conveniently before I had time to consider whether I had any specific memory of him doing something I hated with which to finish the other thought or if I merely imagined that he must have. And THEN I thought “what, the democrats hold a majority? Somebody should tell them.” It is worth noting that Mitch McConnell has a smaller portrait but a substantially more pronounced head, accompanied by a phallic power symbol. And then I figured out I was looking for Bobby Jindal and changed the subject. However, in the process of changing the subject several hours elapsed, and now I have sleep to do.

Phreego, it was a sham! What a fool I’ve been! This angry bearded man is obviously not going to be having any of that.

===================================

I should add that my remark about “being outraged” was unrelated to the recent Wall Street protests in which I’m told people got beaten up for no reason; I didn’t realize people were outraged about that yet and thus wasn’t aware of it. I wish more people would protest the stock market. I wish they’d protested it 12 years ago back when people were paying America OnLine millions of dollars because it seemed like it might make millions of dollars some day. All these krippendorfuses trading imaginary money and it doesn’t even come in pretty Monopoly colors think they’re better than us? I can’t stand it. I want to go and see if there are any recently broken windows and then throw potatoes through them.

===================================

also by 2014 it became apparent to me that despite being different people supposedly pushing opposite agendas they seem to be rather inseparable, and only pretending to disagree to further the cause of not accomplishing anything.

I notice this is a lot less interesting a week afterward.

Nobody wants nemitz in their homes, and apparently nature doesn’t want nemitz outside, either.

Last week on Bimshwel, State Street New Haven, Connecticut, Amelica residents were mildly inconvenienced by a dwindling hurricane that actually did damage in other places. I actually made this picture before that even happened and meant to post it on its own, in anticipation of the electricity going out, me thinking that a decent excuse to post an entry of minimal effort, but the electricity went out before I could, and then afterward I no longer had my justification.

Ehhhso the next day more trucks came and went. I considered that the tree may have been declared a cultural landmark that was actually being protected from removal.

12:30pmish: A slightly more organized rabble assembles at the usual meeting place. It’s about time some professionals took pictures of the tree. And this time with video cameras, just in case the tree tries anything.

Here they assess whether an apartment building is tragic-looking enough to film in front of. The sight of me living inside it must have clinched the deal.

Unfortunately I haven’t had local television access in a while so I didn’t recognize the famous Jocelyn Maminta of WTNH Action News 8. Though who would, with those magnificent sunglasses? That is twice as good as Clark Kent’s disguise. I might recognize Al Terzi, even though he defected to WFSB3 which I never watched in 1989. WTNH also hasn’t been called “Action News 8” since around the same time.

The Mayor said some things here, such as that approximately 100,000 manly hours had been expended in this aftermath. He did not clarify how many of the hours were devoted to driving up to stuff and then driving away from it, and if the county accountyants had multiplied this by the number of extra people in the vehicles who weren’t even driving.
I wanted to emerge from my doorway and proclaim something in the vein of

Please citizens, do not be alarmed! We are doing our best to drag this story out as long as possible! We are taking every measure necessary to keep up the illusion that we are the primary victims in this matter that was actually killing people and destroying homes two days before it made us ornery, and continue comparing it to an incident from 1985 that this is in no way comparable to. I am enormously honored to see that you deemed my apartment decrepitated enough to make your speeches in front of.

However, I should inform you that it looked like this before the hurricane, and as far as I can figure those trucks kept coming and leaving because you ordered them not to remove the tree until your schedule allowed you to personally admonish it.
I didn’t. I also just today didn’t go to a free local barbecue because I was terrified at the thought of having to speak to a stranger to get a hot dog. In food service situations it is alright because I can imagine I am paying people to not impose further social obligations on me.

I don’t know who was here with NBC; I assume it was the guy who kept glaring at me like I’d messed up his shot after I chose to emerge from my chamber with a queenly wave in the midst of the mayor’s words to take a picture of this van. I only know that if there’s any justice, it got legally held for ransom towed away and impounded, like what happens if somebody who actually lives here tries to park here. Don’t they know this lot is reserved for

sex limousines?

There are/were some legitimate disaster areas in Connecticut, and even further north in Vermont and such, but New Haven isn’t one. That’s why my parents were evacuated and came to where I was.

As to why they stuffed my kitchen with cucumbers and cans of beans and then left, I’m afraid that’s a personal, family matter and it’s highly inappropriate for you to bring it up.

The mayor should have posed in front of this. It is the apartment above mine. It was also like this before the storm. The people renovating it haven’t finished yet, I guess. They didn’t bother to lock the door to it, either.

I bet the mayor was ecstatic when he found out there were some locales under his juristiction without power. East Haven, my old haven, had some actual wrecked homes to shoot. All New Haven got was a tree that was due to fall over anyway.

Now only the stump is left, but still surrounded, and still presumably dangerous. Or maybe this is meant to be interpreted as a shrine. I thought this would be funny but actually it makes me kind of sad. It’s going to be even harder to park here now.

This is the zone of my previous dwelling, as seen by a picture telephone my mother sent before she rounded up the beans. Thankfully my brother Ibrow uploaded it at the internet through his aggregate-accessory fruit, because Verizon would have charged me twenty five cents if I’d done it.

Two people like that my ancestral home is in peril. The same number of people who historically have liked nemitz. There is no coincidence.

Here is how it looks from another angle. What a catastrophe! Oh and also this was from last year and a regular thunderstorm. This street floods EVERY year. Gobward it’s a good thing I made this story two entries; otherwise it would be lazy of me to use the same non-gag twice. Observe how I started out by implying this place was worse hit than the other place and then I dismissed that as folly. I wrote all this for nothing. It makes me sad. In the future I pledge only to address matters of substance.

Next week: exclusive before and after pictures detailing the tragic effects of a hurricane on disco.

Howdy. I do not have local electricity at the moment! This prevents my computomatic from from participating in many tasks. While I borrow the electricity of others I foolishly neglected to bring my mouse, which prevents me from doing everything else!
==============================

Last.fm is yet another one of those websites with a stupid name that exists soley to collect personally identifiable information about users for the purpose of directing advertisements at them. Information which people gladly give up because it’s easier to get popular by liking stuff that already exists than by making your own stuff. So once I realized this site wasn’t getting me anywhere, I waited five years and got my own last.fm page. Naturally I can’t excell at last.fm either because the only stuff I like is stuff that nobody I like likes.

This then causes stuff that I don’t even like to like me.
Anyway last.fm is pertinent to whatever we decide is music. I considered putting a little gizmo from last.fm on this my page here which would show you whatever thing I had listened to most recently that lasty had agreed to acknowledge. However, as much as I’d love to impose my obtuse musical tastes on every person in the universe, it wouldn’t do ANYbody much good to know I was listening to “Stage 3” by “Sakamoto, Takenouchi, Fujio.” Fortunately, I am a compulsive wreck and it turns out that I enjoy having a sorted list of the noises I choose to hear. This also now means I will deliberately not listen to a specific piece by someone if I’ve statistically listened too often, if the site cannot count it at all due it being in an incompatible sound format, or I just don’t know who made it, and thus cannot label the file appropriately. So then I spend a considerable amount of time seeking out accurate titles and author data, and then reseeking them when I suddenly decide what I have “seems” wrong. It’s the most work I put into anything that nobody cares about if we exclude the webpage I wrote about Pac in Time.

Since the site content is largely determined by users, it takes on a few negative wikipedia similarities, such as asinine edit-revert battles and inconsequential gags interpreted as canonical fact.

Meanwhile, any of the 71,270 or so purported listeners who end up at this page will see this inexplicable fragment of your petty argument in the absence of actual information. Do you know what an accomplishment it is to make the site’s-point-missing totalitarian bonehead whose entire music collection is credited simply to “nintendo,” including an inestimable number of tracks named “Title Theme” seem sensible by comparison? (I think that you do not)

As it wasn’t fashionable to acknowledge video game staffs in 1987, Castlevania therefore contained joke credits. That the composer is listed as “James Banana” in the joke credits does not mean the real composer uses that as an alias or was ever actually known as that to anybody. After initially getting ornery at the intro line there I considered it may have been inserted facetiously and that I should feel bad for composing such an elaborate complaint without an alias, but a visit to the Videogame Music Database website, where I get most of my compulsion feeding data –my dealer, in effect–, reveals a lively argument over whether James Banana is an “alias” or a collaborative “unit.”

How can I trust you if you won’t even face me, coward!


If James Banana gets to be a unit then Green Stranger should be a module, Cafebar Read can be a cafe bar and Christopher Bee is a hatrack. The only unit I have time for is Unit 7 in my first grade math book because it has clocks in it.

I am going to keep talking about this.

By the presented logic, the game’s data must have formed over millions of years through a natural geotechnical process, because there are no artists or programmers in the credits at all, because the credits are 100% FAKE. In the breakthrough interview where Yamashita revealed that she didn’t create the ubiquitous “Vampire Killer” theme (maybe you should take a minute to let that sink in before continuing) and only seemed to have implied so in the past because like a normal person she doesn’t know what the “titles” of any video game music is, the inquisitor wastes time asking why she is credited as Jimmy Bans. Asks this before anything else, in fact.

The PROPER question would be “why aren’t you credited at all?” Or “why are you credited as James Banana when nobody else on the Konami staff was afforded a precious joke name? Was that a stipulation in your contract, that you get first pick of all the non-acknowledgement? Who do you think you ARE, anyway? Oh right, James Banana.” It appears that most of Yamashita’s online correspondence with Americans is from people trying to find out which specific songs she made, just so they can tag their mp3s properly because the only people I have anything in common with are embarrassing nerds.

NO YOU CANNOT BE MY FRIEND

Artists who collaborate on a project are different than either of them credited separately, and often just from themselves.

Jun Chikuma seems to be jealous of herself. Although to be fair the regular one did the music for Faxanadu whereas Chiki enjoys continual success rearranging the same 10 note tune in endless Bomberman titles. Both of these examples leave me surprised that the composer can play a flute. Perhaps she just likes to pose with it.

Faxanadu, incibiddly, has the only game music that I can play on my verizon telephone.

Yes I’ve been using computers for 18 years why do you ask?

I don’t mind last.fm converting my romanized japanese names into fancy symbols, but I don’t appreciate the green splat icon showing up every time I play one of these, telling the imaginary world that looks at my page that I have “misspelled” someone’s name. They actually expect me to go through my entire collection and replace “noriyuki iwadare” with some characters that I cannot type and that I cannot read. I have no concept of what means, even if it’s directly beside While there appear to be two Kenji Yamamotos whose names are spelt differently in their native print, that hardly justifies splotching rotten tomatoes all over my play-lists.

These two clearly have it in for me today.

De-dei-de-de-deih dat’s all, folks!

Next week I will post weird pictures to distract from the boring stuff I type about.

how did this take hours to do?, I can't... move!, I think you broke it | How to lose a guy in (2) days | !

The internet hates the humidity. Once the temperature here goes over 80 degrees my connection passes out from exhaustion, which is a surprising impediment to my ability to upload junk here.

====================================================================

I don’t need Mac Tonight watching me use the toilet. Nor most people, now that I think of it.

In search of a good fake-mistaken reference for pink hands (I went with “demons”), I thought for certain, –because superheroes are inherently funny and everybody but me knows stuff about them who would thus be in position to appreciate such a mentioning– there was a DC or Marvel character who had pink gloves that I might use. Not because I remember there being one; it just seemed like there was a good chance. I didn’t find one. Not one I could pick out of a crowd, anyhow. I did come across this picture (from this page this page.) There are a LOT of weird looking goofs I don’t recognize in there, and there’s no sense in asking about them all. However…

who’s that oaf next to Wonder Woman that isn’t Superman? MAILMAN? Or is he a train ticket collector, maybe? He does an important job but he’s not a hero of intergalactic acclaim! In fact, he’s a monster for plundering and combining the DNA of Herve Villechaiz and Gary Coleman in an attempt to create an ultimate being. It’s still too soon, Mail Man! Not to mention likely to make your Jim Morrison/any actor from the 1970s clone jealous. Additionally, I used to think Jim Morrison, Van Morrison and Morrissey were the same person. They are all exhibit equally morris-like tendencies in my eyes. I would not be surprised to see them shilling for cat food.

I am also of the opinion that Plastic Man is getting a little chummy with Darkseid and Orko back there.

Oh, OH. ExcYUSE me. Are you two friends? Man, that guy’s so touchy just because the doctor who filled out his birth certificate came down with a bit of dyslexia. That’s even weaker reasoning than

Lex Luthor hating Superman forever over inadvertently making him bald –a condition easily remedied by either of these two who regularly create exact robot duplicates of themselves out of stuff they just find lying around, sometimes while in prison,— which I’m told was largely written/fired out of “canon” not terribly wrong after this story was published. Darkseid’s name is STILL misspelled, so many years later. Whenever I see his name I always think it wants to be pronounced “dark seed.” Clearly he can’t be all that evil since he keeps his bit torrent ratio up. At worst he’s a pointy 1970s roller skate.

And… I expect to be at a hotel before I get this posted so don’t be surprised if I end this without any sort of conclusion.

Hey how about that I ended up staying at the hotel before I got this out because my computer is too dumb to recognize certain types of wireless internet and I’m too dumb to know which or why and thus I now have plenty of time to give you a conclusion.

I do not always make good use of my time.

But sometimes I do.

I can't... move!, popular with the robots, world's finest toilets | How to lose a guy in (5) days | !

Right, so I saw that avatar movie. I wrote something pretty mundane about it but I discovered I referred to it in what I wrote about another movie I saw more recently so I may as well put it here. Unless you have a better idea. If you do you’d better tell me quickly! No, too late. I doubt I’m the first person to make an Ultima joke in reference to it, so may I please be the last?

I like weird looking plants, but they are nothing new to me. I growed up seeing them all over the place, in a very similar context: inside big rectangles I could not enter.

Rygar had floating islands, Chrono Trigger had floating islands, Legend of Dogoon that I SLAMMED last week (in February) had floating islands. I like floating islands but James Cameron didn’t invent them. I found the Spindizzy Worlds more engaging than Pan Dora. It may have helped if my glasses and / or left eye had been calibrated properly; the whole film was blurry. I could see layers, but they were like viewmaster layers; some things stood out but they stood out by uniform amounts, and if they were near an edge of the screen they looked weird. Also, no attempt seemed to have been made to compensate for the darkness caused by the polarizing lines on the spectacle lenses; everything was just a little bit dark. No, excuse me, not EVERYthing…

the bright green EXIT signs on both sides of the screen were at full luminance and at least one was visible to me the entire time. Also, lights on the floor and behind me to the left.
The presentation itself was alright. Nothing that will change my life or that I’ll always remember. As any amount of people have mentioned the story and the characters are nothing new. The angry guy among the pure people who hates outsiders for good reason but that has to be proven wrong is especially played out, to me, though I must admit I liked that character better than some others. You can’t go wrong with bad science men vs good forest men. Maybe I’ll have an easier time siding with the forest men when they’re not all enormous, hostile Captain Planets.

I don’t mind the navies as long as they are presented exclusively as space aliens, with no allegorical implication that everybody would be better off living that way. The na-vi have no art, no individuality, no curiosity for that which they do not know. That suits them fine, but it does not suit me. Although that’s just as well, as anyone with a physical or mental defect is liable to be beaten to death or left to starve in a culture like that.

Which wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing in one example I can think of, but I believe in general it would be. They’re probably closer to harmony than we are now, and it’s good to keep in mind possibilities for alternate ways of living, but there is no perfect society, nor has any ever existed. Perhaps there can be one, but it won’t be like that.

I think the 3-d may actually have detracted from the experience, to me. Without that I could have viewed the thing at full brightness, without stupid glasses, and without the picture being blurry. I found myself wanting to close the less accurate eye, a lot. A question struck me: do I normally do that? Do I view most films with the less good eye closed? Does being prevented from doing that for fear of losing part of the “experience” actually do more to ruin things for me? If I closed my left eye, the right’s vision was clear (but dim). I could have watched the whole movie like that, but I kept hoping I’d suddenly figure out a way to make the full picture less blurry, and so I kept both vision orbs in use for nearly the entire time. I’ve long suspected my actual vision was less than perfect with regard to things lining up in both eyes. If I really pay attention to a thing, I notice that there are two slightly different versions of it front of me. I assumed that was normal. Maybe it isn’t! It works alright for me, because I know nothing else, and nobody has suggested that a certain aspect of it is supposed to be a certain way (aside from when I’ve been accused of being colorblind), because it’s normal and nobody thinks there’s anything to say about it. However, once I start looking through a preconfigured mode of alternate vision, my alternate mode of function becomes clear. I may need to have a special corrective monocle made for myself that I only use when viewing three-dimensional films. I can squeeze my less good eye a certain way to make it focus properly, but I fear that will damage the thing further, and the eye is difficult to access with a plastic frame in the way, besides.

The film was filled with scenes – more than I can remember seeing in any other film – that I have watched – whose only purposes were to show off stuff. Unfortunately, if it looks blurry to you it gets annoying and you want it to hurry up and be done. Don’t you understand, I WANTED to like that. I wanted it to be the greatest thing I’d ever seen, but it wasn’t because I’m a broken human. I am doomed to enjoy less things than others and to be alone while I do it. This makes me sad.

And so I saw the dragon film. I don’t think I told you about the time I watched avatar, so I posted my contextless summary above here… The 3d worked better for me this time because I was closer to the screen, but it still wasn’t perfect. A pity I couldn’t get an imax screening. One person at whom I described my D-related woes after both these movies responded both times “you might need glasses.” Well I was already wearing glasses, they were just dorky 3d glasses. As for NORMAL spectacles, I don’t NEED them if the only thing I can’t see and only on one side properly are 3d movies that use the polarization method. And besides either way the thing would still be dim the whole time.

I noticed that the main human, Wesley or Herbie or whoever his name was didn’t have perfect teeth. Obviously the fat frubby Scotch Norsemen who comprised the bulk of the figures in the movie wouldn’t, but I was surprised that the thin characters were allowed to get away with it. They also were allowed to get away with talking in standard American accents. I’m not about to accuse that overweight people are intentionally made to look funny and sound funny in comparison to “normal” thin people because I honestly didn’t consider that until now and look we’re not even half way through this. So I’ll just imply it for the moment.

The movie did its job. It developed characters, it featured non-developed semi-characters which could be merchandised, progressed plot and waited to bore out most of its plot holes until the height of tension, when I would feel least inclined to consider them, and such and such. It did this without any pop culture references or overt sex innuendo and kept bad-smell-based “humor” to a minimum, which I didn’t know was allowed in animated movies these days. At least nothing bad enough that I felt compelled to make a note reminding myself to complain about it. And so I will complain about another thing.

The music was nice. A pity, since I’d have love to watch this in silence with closed captioning rather than hear the voice acting. Maybe I can get a version dubbed into Chinese with English subtitles. The technology exists, though it needs work before it can be employed without launching abysmal internet memeys. The kid, what was his name, Danny or Milo, he sounded completely bored the whole time, even when he was doing stuff that had my eyes been properly configured to see through 3d lenses would look fairly exciting.

One thing I like about watching cartoons from other countries is that there’s very little chance half the characters will sound like people from Saturday Night Live or Glee or whatever dominant white-people entertainment was hot at the time they were cast. Just in the previews I heard Mike Myers, Eddie Murphy, Steve Carrell and Jack McBrayer, and I saw Will Ferrell and Tina Fey’s names threatened in letter credits for something or another that I was too busy cringing at to hear the vocal accompaniment to. Three minutes into the actual movie, which was a good 45 minutes after I entered the theater, hey here’s a fat dwarf who sounds like Craig Ferguson, who never even worked for NBC. All these people are on or have been on major tv shows. They’ve made their money. Why do they agree to go along with this? None of them are voicing the characters; they’re just talking in their normal tv voices so that I recognize them. It’s nothing new but I’ve always hated it and I still do, whether they’re people I dislike or the alternative. I merely resisted any pressure to go and see one of these productions until now, and the previews tend to be targeted at whoever the audience is expected to be, in this case children, accompanied by adults, because every movie has to be at least PG, thus more ugly computer graphic movies, thus more boring human voices coming out of bright and shiny animate people. “But Mike Myers is doing an exaggerated SCOTTISH accent and he is CANADIAN!” but even that’s a Scottish accent he’s done before this role, and if we pretend he hasn’t, Shreck trash alone has made it more ubiquitous than his actual voice, and this voice has been imitated by people in other movies (this one, for example) and terrible gum commercials.

In the credits for what I did see, I was informed that Kristen Wiig had talked for someone or another. She was also on Saturday Night Live, and while I was able to find some sketches she was tolerable in before I stopped watching, there was nothing remarkable about the way she spoke. I certainly didn’t hear “her” when I heard the voice in the movie. I just heard A voice that I didn’t much care about, whoever it was. Why cast someone like that? Another character was Jonah Hill, and instead of thinking “oh Jonah Hill I like him in contemporary emotionless stoner movies that are utterly disconnected from this” I spent the entire movie trying to figure out if it was Jack Black, who would also have been distracting. However, I shouldn’t have had to think any of these things because the character was neither of them.

Every movie advertised in the lobby was a remake or a sequel. Again, nothing new, and again nothing I’m content with, either. The one thing that is new is that I neglected to bring my camera into the building and so have no dark and/or blurry pictures of unnecessary things. The previews that I alluded to reflected my lack of excitement or mere optimism for things to come. As these tend to come in superficially similar pairs (Bug Life and Antz, Shark Tale and Finding Nemmy, echt), two of them movies were about “so bad, I’m good” bootleg I M Meens without Warwick Davis in them. One was a blue alien (who ever heard of such a thing?) that reminded me a lot of that horrible alien that gets beaten up by the dogs for crashing into the fire hydrant, except instead of being typical and uninteresting for three minutes we get, I assume, thirty or so cycles of it. These clods have nothing on The Smoggies. Also, please don’t make a Smoggies movie.

The color in these computer movies is always the same. Everything is perfectly lit. The rate of movement, the force of gravity and pacing and such are also always the same. I feel like I’ve seen all these places before. Much like with video games, once they went “3d,” –in the rendering, not necessarily the projection– particularly after 256 color palettes were dropped, everything looked monotonous to me. Plus most of the plasma and spread orb guns turned into regular dumb old army guns. Yes, sure, all ye olde Hanna Barbera street corners looked the same and one Disney castle courtyard is like any other, but I challenge you even to identify but a graphic department by its backgrounds these days, much less a specific film (and if you can give me a day or so to acknowledge it because writing this made me tired). And while they’ve had 14 years to find an appealing way of showing computer cartoon humans, nobody’s done it yet. I hate their big chests and little legs, but I also hate them with realistic proportions. I hate them with huge blobby heads, I hate them with conservatively sized mannequin heads. I hate them with little eyes really close together, I hate them with big eyes that allot space for a nose. In short, I hate. I also hate in long. I’m just as bitter and unpleasable as I ever have been, but I’m getting more specific. Once I’ve identified every problem I will bring my findings before the council and they will abolish things I don’t like.

After a decade and a half of solid regurgitation of stuff from before we’re now starting to re-puke up the stuff we already puked up and re-ate. We’ve already HAD a “new” nightmare on elm street. We’ve already had a “next” karate kid. Toy Story 3 reminds me too much of The Brave Little Toaster for comfort. To be fair, I am rarely comforted by brave toasters of any size, nor little toasters of any demeanor. Even when they have wings.

I am in the process of re-evaluating some of the stuff that I allowed myself to be revolted by in the 90s now that I see it under attack by forces yet less meritorious, and this does, alarmingly enough, include that blasted toaster. I also have it on no authority less than a youtube comment itself that some of the toaster people went on to be involved with the Pixar people, but that doesn’t make the Toy Story any less creepy than it ever was. This one has Kens and Barbies in it. Although the apparent Mattel buy-in likely spares us any overplayed “Ken is a closeted homosexual with no genitals who doesn’t realize he’s gay because he’s the only man in town but he couldn’t act on his urges even if they became relevant” jokes, I think the writers should have the right to include such things should they deem it prudent, rather than to be bound by strict licensing codes of conduct. And you know me well enough to understand that I’d find a way to be annoyed even if Mattel granted Pixar a temporary “Ken is gay” license because I already implied I was comedically disaffected by that. I may just be annoyed at the money flow involved, and it goes both ways, surely, with getting existent products into works of fiction that serve to promote them without doing anything that a free non-licensed stand-in couldn’t. Although in this franchise the stand-in itself would be marketed as an original product and I don’t think I could take that, either. I don’t find “toys doing stupid stuff” funny unless they’re MY toys and I’M making them do the stupid stuff, besides.

You think I have any control over this??

We’ve already flipped and dissected every “stupid,” “hokey,” or “sincere” thing about our dominant consumer generation’s youths. My mother was 35 when that The Brady Bunch movie came out. I’m no fan of the Smurfs, nor was I ever, but I’d love another 8 years to not have Hollywuh pretend it knew smurfs were stupid all along and act like that’s news to ME. It could even be argued, by me, regardless of anything to base it on, that the avatarts were space smurfs who just happened to be bigger than Gargamel. Frimbip, Robot Chicken’s been showing action figures acting uncivilly toward each other ever since Seth Green found web pages from 1998 and realized he could rip them off for free but get paid for it. MacGuyver doesn’t even get THAT honor; it gets, “MacGruber,” a movie about a one joke non-parody of itself, with its origin, shockingly enough, being Saturday Night Live. That may even be a less reprehensible approach, but I’m far from optimistic about it.

I personally can’t stand the Robot Chicken mouth(s), particularly the banana shaped tooth kayak that shows up in every character’s talk cycle and



the bright white square teeth that they alternate scenes with depending on circumstances I don’t care to investigate. Yes, I pay way too much attention to the teeth of animated characters. It’s obvious more time is spent matching the mouth to every syllable than any other aspect of the animation, so who can blame me for noticing? I meant that for this series specifically but it’s true in general. Also, the low-budget amusement which should come from such apparently cheap production values is rent asund when they incorporate realistic explosions, bullet physics and blood (and there’s usually blood). Clearly somebody is spending thousands of dollars on this junk and should be held to higher standards than you-tubewits. Robot Chicken is the inexplicably legalized, advertisement selling television equivalent of bootleg Calvin shirts. Except it actually had a bootleg Calvin sketch, except Calvin was actually called “Calvin” and was a murderer and nobody cared. If I put a picture of Calvin acting in a comparatively courteous manner on this website that I do for free, however… again nobody will care because the Universal Press Syndicate gets its property violated a lot more often than the Shipyard Brewing Company does.

That is, I expect whoever is selling bootleg calvins out of a not necessarily mobile storefront on a main street in the nation’s capital is getting taken down before I am. The only reason Eli Co didn’t thank me for alerting non-yacht owners to the existence of their product is because when we spend $3.50 on 12 ounces of soda we expect to get six cans of it.

Thinking back… Starsky and Hutch, Miami Vice, Inspector Gadget, Dukes of Hazzard, Underdog, The Cat in the Hat, Land of the Lost, Bewitched… has there been one year since this rue wave started that there hasn’t been a nationally distributed hip, new, cynical, utterly off-the-mark take that ultimately nobody cared about on an old concept? (And how many of these had Will Ferrell involved? (the last two (if we don’t include Curious George, which I didn’t get the impression was cynical (oh (yes (stop it (when I feel like it (how about now (I’m considering it)))))))) Even the “original” new movies are full of this intolerable attitude. “Guys, guys! Nah. Nih-nah. Nah, ya caaaan’t… nah. Yeah, no…” I’m tired of every movie having Hal 9000 in it. The movie Hal was IN didn’t have as much Hal in it as one Ben Stiller movie despite being an estimated 4 days long and Hal being the single most referenced concept about it. Nobody ever says “hey, remember that movie where the guy floats through space silently for 30 minutes and then turns into a baby for no reason?” Besides the point.

Nobody can crash into a wall, fall off a bicycle, slip on a potato or otherwise suffer a public indignity without this type of character providing an understated “ooh, ouch.” or “gotta hurt.” “Awkward.” “Busted.” If THAT jackass can tell it hurt, shouldn’t I also have the right to? This is why people [on internet forums] hate Garfield. Garfield tells us what’s funny about something kwazy in the most disinterested way possible. Looking DOWN on me for finding humor in the writer’s work. DARING me to laugh at it. You thought THAT was funny? That ain’t NUTHIN oops out of space. I do this sometimes, but I don’t have an editor, much less a staff of them plus ghost-artists who can redraw a joke that I messed up by liking it so much that I couldn’t RISK you not getting it, even at the alternate risk of making you hostile toward it.

Even the music in these things tends to be judgmental. It likes to stop abruptly when something deliberately stupid occurs. “A little help…?” It’s not enough that the character failed, the soundtrack has to let me know a failure occurred by itself failing. It’s just like a “record scratch” sound effect except the sound people finally realized that by pretending they used analog sound equipment they implied that non-digital technology was adequate and the companies pushing expensive new projectors and audio systems on all the theaters wouldn’t like that. At least somebody finally cleared all the crickets out of here.

I tell you, those things are malevolent.

Next week, I compare How to Train Your Dragon to the Disney version of Robin Hood, connect this to amateur singing competition tv shows somehow and complain about them again.

I’m afraid we have to go with your first response.

Remind me to tell you about raisins sometime sometime.

———————————————————————-

Can that detection system truly be at all reliable if this shady character can climb right through the not-allowed symbol without anyone noticing? Clearly this is not the service to protect your mailbox with.

Now nobody’s safe. Even the trees are after our mail.

Our precious frozen mail crystals. This stuff is important!

Our top story: a snowflake done showed up!

Well it SHOULD. These laws are outdated and irrelevant! The international community is doing NOTHING to address the threats of modern times.

After them, you fools! Are you truly going to let them get away with it? He can’t possibly hit ALL of you with his ninja stars! Arrgh, they think they’re so cool!

Once again it’s up to the blessed corporations of the world to make the best of a bad situation.

Now all that’s left is to proofread this to make sure it forms a coherent narrative. So hopefully I’ll get to that one of these days.

I can't... move!, popular with the robots, talking dogs | How to lose a guy in (6) days | !

You agree with me that 1 am is way too late for the idiots a block over from me to be blasting corny music all over the place, don’t you?

==================================================

Dear loyal bimshwel customers: I’m deadHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH APRULFOOOOUHAGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHG I’VE BEEN SHOT

HA HA NO I HAVEN’T!GOTCHA THAT TIME AYPRALLL FOOOOOOOOHHHHHHNOOOOO I’VE BEEN SHOT AGAIN!

NOPE NOT REALLY! HA HA HA HOOOGOSH DEAR FLOOPITY I’VE LAUGHED SO HARD I’VE CAUSED MYSELF MORTAL INJURY NO I HAVEN’T

HA HA HA HO NOW IS THE TIME WHEN I LAUGH NO IT ISN’t YES IT IS HA HA HA H

And now I am sad.
YES INDEEDNO NOT REALLY